HIS Radeon X700 AGP Review

Doom 3

Doom 3 is one of the heaviest games available today. As we’ve done on other programs, we ran this game at three resolutions: 1024x768x32, 1280x1024x32 and 1600x1200x32. This game allows several image quality levels and we’ve done our benchmarking on two levels, low and high. We ran demo1 four times and wrote the obtained number of frames per second. The first result we discarded at once, since it is far inferior than the other results. This happens because at the first time we run the demo the game must load all textures to video memory, fact that doesn’t happen from the second time we run the demo on. From the three results left, we consider as our official result the middle result, i.e., we discard the highest and the lowest values. Curiously almost all times the values obtained at the second round on were the same.

A very important detail that we must mention is that Doom 3 has an internal FPS lock: it is only capable of generating 60 frames per second, even if your board is able to produce more frames per second than that. This is done in order to make the game to have the same “playability” sensation independently from the video card installed on the PC. This lock, however, is disabled in the game benchmarking mode.

For further details on how to measure 3D performance with Doom 3, read our tutorial on this subject.

At a resolution of 1024×768 without any image quality enhancement, HIS Radeon X700 was beaten by ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 93.82% faster, XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 74.50% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 73.71% faster, Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP, which was 60.16% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 51.20% faster, Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, which was 7.17% faster and ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 6.18% faster.

At a resolution of 1280×1024 without any image quality enhancement, HIS Radeon X700 was beaten by XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 155.26% faster, ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 150.45% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 113.81% faster, Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP, which was 83.48% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 63.96% faster, Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, which was 7.51% faster and ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 3.30% faster.

At a resolution of 1600×1200 without any image quality enhancement, HIS Radeon X700 achieved a performance similar to ATI Radeon 9800 XT, and it was beaten by XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 228.95% faster, ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 183.77% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 141.67% faster, Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP, which was 96.93% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 75.00% faster and Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, which was 13.60% faster.

At a resolution of 1024×768 enabling image quality enhancements, HIS Radeon X700 was 3.85% faster than Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, and it was beaten by ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 116.10% faster, XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 91.84% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 88.44% faster, Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP, which was 72.56% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 57.82% faster and ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 6.80% faster.

At a resolution of 1280×1024 enabling image quality enhancements, HIS Radeon X700 achieved a performance similar to Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, and it was beaten by ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 161.04% faster, XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 160.06% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 117.86% faster, Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP, which was 86.69% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 62.66% faster, and ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 3.57% faster.

At a resolution of 1600×1200 enabling image quality enhancements, HIS Radeon X700 achieved a performance similar to ATI Radeon 9800 XT, and it was beaten by XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 218.98% faster, ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 188.89% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 140.28% faster, Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP, which was 98.15% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 73.15% faster and Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, which was 6.48% faster.